Quotes by American Authors - Page 2483

How often do the poor in the US get to stand in front of their nation's Marie Antoinette's and shove the stale, mass-produced cake of lower class reality back into their mouths?
M.B. Dallocchio
You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability ratherthanan asset - that in view of the fact that spirit creates formwe are justified in supposingthat you must have brains. For you, a symbol of theunit, stiff and sharp,conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority andliking for everythingself-dependent, anything anambitious civilization might produce: for you, unaided, toattempt through sheerreserve, to confuse presumptions resulting fromobservation, is idle. You cannot make usthink you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you arebrilliant, itis not because your petals are the without-which-nothingof pre-eminence. Would you not, minusthorns, be a what-is-this, a mereperculiarity? They are not proof against a worm, theelements, or mildew;but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliancewithout co-ordination? Guarding theinfinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience tothe remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be re-membered too violently,your thorns are the best part of you.
Marianne Moore
Charlie is one of the big good guys in my universe.
Robin McKinley
Quit questioning God and start trusting Him!
Joel Osteen
The truth is this: People that give you focus, energy and anger do care. If you were nothing then you wouldn't be able to affect them. Behind every over reaction was first the thought that your opinion mattered and your respect was once of value or you wouldn't get the response you got.
Shannon L. Alder
Mindfulness meditation doesn't change life. Life remains as fragile and unpredictable as ever. Meditation changes the heart's capacity to accept life as it is. It teaches the heart to be more accommodating, not by beating it into submission, but by making it clear that accommodation is a gratifying choice.
Sylvia Boorstein
The boy took my sketchbook.
Ashley Earley
Without risk, life is far too predictable
Renee Ahdieh
Success-minded people must understand that the use of profane and obscene words have no place in their vocabulary.
John Patrick Hickey
I learned that the day "The Viper's Drag" slipped from between my fingers. But whatever might be lost or broken or forgotten is nothing compared to the miraculous rebirth that occurs every time the needle hits the groove. Here is Fats Waller Himself, not dead but present, so present that he overwhelms the well-ordered precincts of the living room. The sound sprawls. What vibrates here has more life than any room.
Geoffrey O'Brien
If she’d thought the oncoming storm outside was crazy, it was nothing compared to what happened between her and Finn every time they so much as looked at each other.
Jill Shalvis
Ma'am is yet another horrible-sounding word in the lexicon of words that women are stuck with to describe various aspects of their body/life/mental state/hair. Vagina. Moist. Fallopian tubes. Yeast infection. Clitoris. Frizz. These are all terrible words, and yet they are our assigned descriptors. Who made up these words? Women certainly didn't. If, at the beginning of time, right after making vaginas, God had asked me, 'What would you like your most intimate and enjoyable part of yourself to be called?',' I most certainly wouldn't have said, 'Vagina.' No woman would, because vagina sounds like a First World War term that was invented to describe a trench that has been mostly blown apart but is still in use. Even off the very top of my head I feel like I could have come up with something better, like for instance the word papoose, which actually as I'm typing it feels like an incredibly brilliant word for vagina.
Jessi Klein
I will form good habits and become their slave.
Og Mandino
A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.
Adlai E. Stevenson II
This is not a contest with your child. The winner is not the one with more points. The winner is the one whose child still loves them when they graduate from high school.
Martin L. Kutscher
If someone thinks you can help or heal them, and you think you can’t, choose their faith over your doubt.
Alan Cohen
Love was never meant to be contained solely in our hearts, just as life in a seed was always meant to break through into the world and become beauty to be shared.
Forrest Curran
Happiness gives you the freedom to enhance your ability to achieve success. Your choices in life are a direct reflection of your level of happiness. It's the sunshine for your soul that you need in order to grow
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
Little girls have large maternal instincts, and they take the Feast of Hungry Ghosts very seriously, and they were making their rounds with small lanterns made from candles inside rolled lotus and sage leaves. I could feel ghosts all around us, moving toward the warmth of the sweet singing voices: You are not alone, the girls sang, you are not forgotten, we care and understand, our own lives are but a candle flame from yours.
Barry Hughart
She represents something about the corporate world that repel me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness.
Barbara Ehrenreich
He didn’t want to admit that his daughter was something more now. I raised my hand guiding one of Nona’s lawn ornaments across the lawn. Making it dance.“Hope,” Dad warned from inside.I dropped it on the lawn. “Such a party pooper.
Holly Hood
As it is for a person, so it is for a company: having a sense of purpose is invigorating and motivating.
Jon Miller
That's what I love most about writers--they're such lousy actors.
Vincent H. O'Neil
She was surprised at how deflating his presence was.
Tom McNeal
Humility is a virtue of the heavenly, not arrogance. Are we the most superior beast on earth? No, not in strength and not in intelligence. It is very arrogant to assume that we are the most intelligent species when we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Both rats and monkeys have been shown to learn from error, yet we have not. More people have died in the name of religion than any other cause on earth. Is massacring God’s creations really serving God – or the devil? And what father would want to see his children constantly divided and fighting? What God would allow a single human life to be sacrificed for monetary gain? Again, the Creator or the devil?
Suzy Kassem
I thought it best to add nothing further, to let the line of his thought lead him to his own conclusions.
Geraldine Brooks
This is the story of a boy named Pete Coutinho, who had a spell put on him. Some people might have called it a curse. I don't know. It depends on a lot of things, on whether you've got gipsy blood, like old Beatriz Sousa, who learned a lot about magic from the wild gitana tribe in the mountains beyond Lisbon, and whether you're satisfied with a fisherman's life in Cabrillo.Not that a fisherman's life is a bad one, far from it. By day you go out in the boats that rock smoothly across the blue Gulf waters, and at night you can listen to music and drink wine at the Shore Haven or the Castle or any of the other taverns on Front Street. What more do you want? What more is there?And what does any sensible man, or any sensible boy, want with that sorcerous sort of glamor that can make everything incredibly bright and shining, deepening colors till they hurt, while wild music swings down from stars that have turned strange and alive? Pete shouldn't have wanted that, I suppose, but he did, and probably that's why there happened to him - what did happen. And the trouble began long before the actual magic started working.("Before I Wake...")
Henry Kuttner
So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.
David Foster Wallace
Our minds are so cluttered with endless to-do lists that there's no room for us to experience the joy in being alive today.
Craig Groeschel
If you had one day left to live, what would you do?
Megan Miranda
We must learn from our struggles.
Roger Thurow
Network administrators all share an abiding and passionate desire for one thing: We want our users to shut up.
Michael W. Lucas
I said very little. I knew that for the time being I was the open air, the place to put the words, not a real interlocutor. And then, ekthout a transition of any kind, she began to tell me .... {p. 134}
Siri Hustvedt
In a calm, clear voice, she suggested that the wyrsa in question could do several highly improbable, athletically difficult and possibly biologically impractical things involving its own mother, a few household implements, and a dead fish.
Mercedes Lackey
You're it for me, Katie. You're my world now.
Faith Sullivan
So you would kill Old Ireland?” Anna Livia said. “You would kill yourself, for without Old Ireland, you wouldn’t be.
Andrew M Greeley
As our faith grows and we come to know more about the attributes of God and his role in our lives and our obedience, we learn to see our weakness in light of these words, "For is it God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Phil. 2:13).
Hayley DiMarco
The Rakshasa," said Percy pedantically, "are a different breed altogether from our vampires. Much in the same way that poodles and dachshunds are different breeds of dog. Rakshasas are reviled in India. Their position as tax collectors is an attempts by the crown to integrate them in a more progressive and mundane manner."Rue said, "Oh, how logical. Because we all know ordaining someone as a tax collector is the surest way to get them accepted by society.
Gail Carriger
Things are never as they seem. A person. A Mark. A statement. They are always deeper than we perceive, like walking in the ocean and suddenly dipping under the surface because the bottom has disappeared beneath your feet. The water appears shallow until you are suddenly flailing around beneath the surface, desperately searching for stable ground once again.
Kelseyleigh Reber
DISARM ALL RAPISTSBut what will we doWith their legs?
Chocolate Waters
Man is a piece of the universe made alive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In Christ the middle wall of partition has been broken down. There is no Jew, no Gentile—no black, white, yellow, or red. We could be one great brotherhood in Jesus Christ. However, until we come to recognize Him as the Prince of Peace and receive His love in our hearts, the racial tensions will increase, racial demands will become more militant, and a great deal of blood will be shed. The race problem could become another flame out of control!
Billy Graham
She loved them so much that she felt a kind of hollowness on the inner surface of her arms whenever she looked at them- an ache of longing to pull them close and hold them tight against her.
Anne Tyler
So many lights you’d think we were living in a constellation
Jodi Lynn Anderson
I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.
Don DeLillo
Perhaps I occasionally sought to give, or inadvertently gave, to the student a sense of battle on the intellectual battlefield. If all you do is to give them a faultless and complete and uninhabited architectural masterpiece, then you do not help them to become builders of their own.
Carl-Gustaf Rossby
A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the eroticfeelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.
Susan Sontag
You know that thing about Death Be Not Proud? Well, Fear Be Not Proud either. And Fear Be Not Elegant. What Fear be is stumbling, bumbling flight, crashing through brush, slip-sliding on pine needles, sloshing through puddles that are always deeper than you expect.
Josh Lanyon
If your life is ever going to get better you'll have to take risks. There is simply no way you can grow without taking chances.
David Viscott
Chaos,leave me never,keep me wildand keep me freeso that mybrokenness will be,the only beautythe world will see.
Robert M. Drake
Tom. Tom, look at me. Has Nora agreed to marry you?""No, but she will because she has to.
Robyn Carr
I wanted to remind you that you do not allow me to deliver boats, as I have been known to crash them.
Jennifer Echols
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment.
Janet Fitch
People mean well; they just aren't here enough to get what we are dealing with or what home means to my mother. Everyone thinks they know what should be done, and their suggestions make me suspect they must consider me an idiot who doesn't comprehend the situation.
George Hodgman
Greed, corruption, violence, sin, deception all come from a lack of understanding that we’re all connected.
Brownell Landrum
I am bewildering you a little. Just enough to help you forget what you came to believe, so that you can remember what you’ve always known.
Martha Beck
The pear trees were bare, their limbs spread open like the viscera of a parasol. Stretching into the darkness beyond, the single houses, double houses, and villas were lined up in cramped, neat rows which ran toward the tip of the peninsula. p94
Sue Monk Kidd
I'm starting to believe that happily ever after includes people doing things that upset each other. We all get cranky, or impatient, or worried, or careless enough to do or say things that hurt someone else. Like it or not, that's normal. We can't blame it all on Olympia's bad energy. The important part is that we feel sorry about what we've done and make up for it. That's something Olympia never did.
Jean Ferris
Esmeralda?” Scarlett turned to the witch next. “Don’t you want to do magic, again?” “Of course I do! It’s the only thing I dream of. Casting spells… Turning people into frogs… Genetically engineering my gingerbread army…
Cassandra Gannon
What I’ve realized is that life doesn’t count for much unless you’re willing to do your small part to leave our children — all of our children — a better world. Any fool can have a child. That doesn’t make you a father. It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.
Barack Obama